Picking up trade

The Three Horseshoes in Yaxley is helping customers to get home, as Nick Yates reports.

• Pub:​ The Three Horseshoes
• Location:​ Yaxley, near Peterborough
• Licensee:​ Mick Soulsby

After a few pints of IPA and a hearty meal in the Three Horseshoes in Yaxley, near Peterborough, customers might not want to leave when it comes to last orders. However, it's a pub truism that leave they must. With a rural pub like the Three Horseshoes some might be tempted to take the car. There are few convenient bus or train links nearby, and with the cold winter nights rapidly approaching who wants to walk home?

Licensee Mick Soulsby has come up with a simple - yet highly effective - way of removing this temptation. For customers can now hop in one of the pub's dedicated taxis to take them home. For just £1 each way, you can get from a pick-up point three miles away from the pub at the start of the night, and back again at its end.

The scheme gives customers and the licensee piece of mind in a venue that both represents, and gives back to, the community.

"It's something I've wanted to do for a while now," explains Mick. "So I arranged it with a local taxi company. It just gives customers the reassurance that they can get home safe and sound after a night in what is a friendly, relaxed atmosphere."

Two round trips​

On Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, two eight-seater taxis make round trips, picking up from Hampton Vale on the outskirts of Peterborough at 7pm and 7.30pm, and then from the Three Horseshoes at 11pm and 11.30pm.

When I visited the pub several weeks after the scheme was launched, Mick said, despite slow take-up initially, he was hopeful the numbers of people taking the taxis would soon pick up. "As word spreads, the pick-up will be greater. They haven't exactly flocked to get in them yet, but a lot of people are talking about it!" Later in the evening, the need for the taxi service is confirmed. I had arranged to meet a friend from Peterborough for a pint in the Three Horseshoes. He arrived in his car an hour late, having found it virtually impossible to get there by public transport.

Mick is aware that there are large numbers of people who would not ordinarily think of going to the pub because of its location. There are around 7,000 homes in the Hampton Vale area alone - "so why not tap into that?" he says.

Mick subsidises the taxi service, making up the taxi firm's shortfall on the £1 journeys every night. He says that the cost is well worth it when you consider the amount this otherwise untapped market spends at the bar. It is far more than a money-making scheme, however. "It's blatantly to bring in more trade," says Mick, "but it's also to take away that temptation to drink-drive, an urge that can be deadly."

Putting money into the community​ The taxi service is just the latest positive initiative at the Three Horseshoes. Locals raise around £350 a week for charity the Yaxley Group Practice through events including quiz and cribbage nights, a monthly comedy club hosting stars from London's Jongleurs Comedy Club, and a theatre club which sees the local dramatic society perform in the pub three or four times a year.

There's an impressive sense of community in the Three Horseshoes. Despite being in a drive-to location, it is full on a Friday night. And, what is more, you notice the large numbers of women and families. Mick - and his customers - all seem to know each other on first-name terms and the pub glows with a warm atmosphere.

Mick's policies and attitudes have helped to shape this. He doesn't, for example, allow any swearing. The few people who have been permanently barred from the pub over the years, he says, have been excluded so for foul language. This, in turn, has attracted the kind of customers who Mick believes have given the pub a reputation as somewhere families and people of all ages are welcome.

"We have never had a single fight in three years," Mick claims. "If you have kids and women, you will never have any trouble."

The Three Horseshoes also sponsors a multitude of sports teams - two Sunday football league teams, two five-a-side football teams and a cricket team. It really is putting back into the community.

"I really feel that the pub is the hub," says Mick. "It's the community. You can't pretend to be a community pub. You've got to get involved with what's going on."

Under the new licensing laws, Mick has been granted an extra hour every night for drinking up. He is proud of the fact that the Three Horseshoes received no objections from any quarter to the application - surely as good a sign as any that this is a Pub to be Proud of.

Mick Soulsby on smoking​

The Three Horseshoes is equipped with what Mick labels "the mother of all fans". Two filters and three extractor fans were installed two years ago. "I hate the habit myself, but it's part and parcel of pub life," says Mick. "I think you have to allow it, but ventilation also gives people the option to avoid it."

The Three Horseshoes will shortly be banning smoking at the bar. Mick has arranged the seats in such a way that second-hand smoke will not pass from the smoking areas into the smoke-free areas.

"Pubs can be organised so they can be enjoyed by smokers and non-smokers at the same time," he declares.